data journalism overview
DESCRIPTION
A presentation for the Developing Caribbean conference. developingcaribbean.orgTRANSCRIPT
@digiphile
radar.oreilly.com/alexh
Open Data Journalism
2013: a networked public sphere
Natural disasters
#Sidibouzid
#Jan25
How did we get here?
In the 1990s, government and civil society spread the Internet globally
In the 2000s, mobile phones and social networking connected us ever more
Open Journalism
The stream
In the 2010s, big data will change everything again.
Image Credit: Real Time Rome from Senseable.MIT.edu
An expanding number of data sources
Commercial and industry data
Social data and crisis data
Open government data platforms
Open data allows citizens to be generative in new ways
230 apps now use or are based on open health data
What about journalism?
“We used to call it CAR”-DeBarros
Bob Woodward, via Cliff1066
“Data-driven journalism is the future”
Source: Tim Berners-Lee in the Guardian
Is “data journalism” just computer assisted reporting
(CAR)?• Spreadsheets• Databases• Text and code editors• Statistics
“Trendy but not new”-Simon Rogers, Guardian
Show, don’t tell
A “Sankey diagram”
What’s changed?
• Online spreadsheets and data tools• Data visualization tools• Open source frameworks • Code sharing• Agile development• Cloud storage and processing (EC2 & Heroku)• The amount of data
“Newspapers are either going to start doing what we do, or they're going to be bypassed and out of date.”
-Elliot Jaspin
That was 1986, in Time.
More than 36 interactive databases published Data sets account for 75% of overall traffic
[Source: CJR]
Global leaders
ProPublica
A tangled web
Dollars for Docs
New York Times
“Make small things faster, make big things possible.”-Derek Willis, NYT
TimesMachine.nytimes.com cost a few hundred dollars. Hosted on Amazon EC2.
The Guardian
Guardian Datablog
Center for Public Integrity
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Offshoring $80 journalists 40 countries 260 gigabytes2.5 million files
Reuters: Connected China
La Nacion
Storytelling still matters.
“We use these tools to find and tell stories. We use them like we use a telephone. The story is still the thing.”
- Anthony DeBarros USA Today
Source: Data Journalism and the Big Picture
Los Angeles Times
SOPA Opera
Best practices?
Understand the context for the data
Show your data
Show your work
Share your code
Plan for reuse
Build on open standards
Citizen-centric
Keeping citizens safe
“Traffic on the NYC Health Department’s restaurant inspection site has gone from 10,000 hits per month to 124,000”
- New York Times
Make data find the people.
Helps citizens who need it most
Privacy challenges
Security challenges• Protect your sources? Protect your data!
Bridge the data divide
Digital signage on the cheap
FOIA & Press Freedom
Fauxpen DataIn an age of “openwashing”…
We need to:
Evaluate licenses.
Peruse the Terms of Service.
Review the governance.
Look at community.
Check the format.
Wired Italy
Emerging trends
Political tensions over open data
• Gun map graphic
Robo-journalism?
Now it’s “Hacks and Hackers”
Photo by Dennis Crowley, from “Hack to Hacker: Rise of the Journalist-Programmer”
Citizens as Sensors: Andhra Pradesh
Citizensourcing
Makers and open source hardware
Safecast
open sourceGeiger counter
Networked accountability
Sensor Journalism
“If Stage 1 of data journalism was “find and scrape data,” then…
Stage 2 was “ask government agencies to release data” in easy to use formats.
Stage 3 is going to be “make your own data”, and those sources of data are going to be automated and updated in real-time.”
-Javaun Moradi, NPR
Data creation
Data journalism with a purpose
Co-create a stronger union
Government of the people, for the people, by the
people, with the people.